Strange Conversations: Part Ninety-Eight
Posted 8 March 2009 in Strange Conversations by Catriona
After looking at one of those “the BBC says most people have only read six of these books” lists that are circulating on Facebook:
ME: And they’re really problematic lists.
NICK: How so?
ME: Well, they have “the complete works of Shakespeare” as one entry and Hamlet as another. Why?
NICK: Weird.
ME: I mean, I’ve only read forty-five of the hundred books on the list, but some of them I’m never going to read. Five People You Meet In Heaven? And the bloody Da Vinci Code?
NICK: Yeah, no.
ME: I may not have read The Da Vinci Code, but I have no qualms about how I have chosen to exercise my literacy.
NICK: Me, neither. And I only read books with spaceships in them.
Share your thoughts [27]
1
Drew wrote at Mar 8, 01:31 pm
I heard there were spaceships in The Da Vinci Code
2
Leigh wrote at Mar 9, 12:54 am
lol its like you took the two most embarrassing books I have ever read :), one I read on a flight and another that I brought for Aunty Pat (you’ve got to admit its a very Aunty Pat book) and being that its very short, I read it quickly so I could tell her I thought she would like it, not say I saw a really soppy book and figured you’d love it …. Maybe I should do the note again using the actually BBC list, although I didn’t see anything that said they thought people would on average have only read 6 ….
3
Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 01:04 am
(I didn’t out you, though! I should say, I’ve seen this completed by at least two other people on Facebook, so I’m not picking on your reading history.)
No, the original BBC list doesn’t say anything about only having read six of them. Or set any limit, as far as I can tell. It simply seems to be the result of a 2003 poll on popular books in the U.K.
Somehow, it’s turned into a Facebook meme, and somewhere along the line the “the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?” tag has become attached.
I have to say, I’m mostly interested in what lists like this, and the patterns of behaviour when these lists become memes, say about how we construct literacy. I mean, the version I saw on Facebook I did quite poorly on—though better than six out of the hundred. Yet I would think I’ve read a fair number of the classics: they just don’t seem to be the kind of classics that are on this list.
The lists are really prose-normative, too. I’m not just talking about the omission of graphic novels, either—the only plays I could see on the list were the two entries from Shakespeare, and the only poem that I remember was the Dante. I find that odd, too.
Here’s the BBC list.
4
heretic wrote at Mar 9, 03:25 am
I’ve never really understood why The Da Vinci Code inspires such spitting rage in so many people. It was a pretty harmless read.
But hey, I love a good Jack Higgins potboiler, so the literati blackballed me a long time ago as an irretrievable philistine ;)
Who actually reads “the complete works of…” anyway? What if there’s one text you’ve never got around to and you’ve memorised the rest? Or there’s one you got halfway through before deciding you liked their old stuff better than their new stuff? :)
You’re right. These lists certainly are problematic…
5
Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 04:06 am
I’m not a literary snob, though. I’m interested in a whole raft of authors and genres that are often criticised as disposable, rubbishing, ephemeral—and the same goes for my work. You think what they say about The Da Vinci Code is bad? You should read what they said about mid-Victorian penny weeklies.
I’m also deeply fond of television, which attracts the same kind of attacks.
But I’m not going to read The Da Vinci Code. It doesn’t fill me with homicidal rage, I can just think of many other books that I’d rather read.
And the longer I teach writing, the less patience I have with frequently incompetent prose.
I do know at least one person who has genuinely read the complete works of Shakespeare—including much, if not all, of the apocrypha. But I’d only bet on that one person.
6
heretic wrote at Mar 9, 06:05 am
Didn’t mean to accuse you of snobbery… It was more of an observation that TDVC seemed to attract an unusually large amount of vitriol. Surely it’s not the only book with clumsy prose – perhaps the problem was that it was just so widely praised.
Sort of like the IE6 of the literary world. Popular, but hated.
7
Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 06:20 am
I don’t know that it was that it was widely praised so much as that it was widely read. The more people read a book, the more likely it is (in this day and age of the blogosphere) to be roundly criticised—whether it’s good or not.
Twilight is another example of that. There are teen books out there that are equally disturbing, but they don’t attract the same attention.
It’s the same with films: blockbusters attract more flack (and more praise) than indie films. But film reviewing is more mianstream than book reviewing, so people, on average, would read more film reviews than they would book reviews. It’s often only when it’s something like The Da Vinci Code, where it’s so widespread, that book reviews garner a lot of column inches.
(I also think the prose goes beyond clumsy, in many ways. But I fully admit to being a crank on the subject.)
8
Tim wrote at Mar 9, 10:08 am
So, Catriona, have you read The Lord of the Rings yet?
9
Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 10:11 am
I’m thinking the longer I wait, the more chance I have of winning games of Humiliation.
10
Tim wrote at Mar 9, 10:14 am
You’re missing out!
Re Hamlet, perhaps they meant the John Marsden novel. :)
P.S.: ‘mainstream’.
11
Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 10:31 am
I’d forgotten about that John Marsden prose version of Hamlet. Because Shakespeare would absolutely have done that had he thought of it first. But, sadly, no: they specified William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Re. “mainstream”: bugger.
12
Tim wrote at Mar 9, 11:31 am
(smirks)
So how many have you read from the 2003 list?
For comparison, here is the ABC’s top 100 list from 2004.
13
Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 11:54 am
Smirking about my mis-spelling? Or about my relative illiteracy based on a Facebook meme?
;)
I do slightly better with the 2003 list: forty-eight out of the hundred books. Combine the two lists and I’d do ever better, because there are many on the BBC list that don’t make it onto the Facebook one—Roald Dahl, for example.
Of course, the ones I have read are not always the ones that would make it into the Western canon—or any form of the Western canon, for that matter. Like The Princess Diaries.
14
Tim wrote at Mar 9, 12:05 pm
Well, let’s wait and see how the canon looks in fifty years! :)
(I’ve read about fifty-one of the BBC 2003 list and thirty-eight of the ABC 2004 list.)
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Catriona wrote at Mar 9, 12:33 pm
I hadn’t counted up the ABC list: I’ve read thirty-five of those (but I didn’t count The Series of Unfortunate Events, because I’ve not read the entire series. I also didn’t count either Dune or The Shipping News: I’ve read a substantial amount of both but finished neither.)
So we’re not too far off in numbers, though I don’t know how many of the individual books would overlap.
And I’m no canonist, but I doubt The Princess Diaries would turn up on the Harold Bloom-style canon. A canon, maybe. It was a fun read, though.
16
Matthew Smith wrote at Mar 10, 12:28 am
The secret of The Davinci Code‘s success and the reason for the subsequent backlash was that in the preface Dan Brown claims that everything in the book is true, so it quickly became controversial which equals book sales which got everybody else fired up.
17
Catriona wrote at Mar 10, 01:11 am
Are we supposed to take his word for it, though? Umberto Eco uses a comparable conceit in The Name of the Rose—more complicated than Brown’s, but locating the novel as existing within a network of shadowy but real non-fictional works, particularly the fluid manuscripts of Adso of Melk, the novel’s narrator. And The Princess Bride has a complicated narrative structure that claims an additional existence for the narrative.
Neither of those authors expect us to believe that their positioning of the narrative is anything other than a way of adding complexity to the narrative and complicating the way in which we receive narrative.
Does Brown actually expect us to believe that his novel is true?
18
Tim wrote at Mar 10, 08:22 am
I think Dan Brown expects a fair chunk of his target audience will believe some or all of it, but I don’t think he cares except insofar as it generates publicity for him.
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Catriona wrote at Mar 10, 09:24 am
I just find it rather odd. When The Name of the Rose came out, I don’t remember people saying, “Oh. My. God. You will not believe what the Catholic Church got up to in the thirteenth century!”
(Or fourteenth. I forget which.)
20
Tim wrote at Mar 10, 01:52 pm
Well, yes. Audience, notoriety etc.
21
Drew wrote at Mar 10, 11:22 pm
For that matter, Lord of the Rings is also prefaced as “true” in that it’s actually supposed to be a translation from the Red Book of Westmarch, but unlike Dan Brown, Tolkien expects no one to believe this cute framing device. Tim is right of course, Brown does expect that a large number of people will believe him and so generate publicity and wealth – which is exactly what happened. For my part, I am just happy to see Winnie-the-Pooh in the top ten. Still, it’s a British list, so there is an element of patriotism to deal with here, I doubt it’s a coincidence that 8 of the top 10 are by British writers and it’s interesting to note that Winnie-the-Pooh only comes in at 92 on the Australian list. I would have voted it no. 1.
22
Drew wrote at Mar 10, 11:25 pm
@Tim – “Well, let’s wait and see how the canon looks in fifty years! :)”
lol, that is why I generally only read people who are already dead, although in saying that I have read about 1/2 that list. I prefer to let time weed out the crappier entries.
23
Catriona wrote at Mar 11, 06:43 am
That’s also the thing with The Name of the Rose, Drew—I seriously doubt that Eco expected people to believe in Adso of Melk’s manuscript.
I find it odd that people did believe in Brown, since it was fairly far-fetched, I believe. I have some concerns with the Catholic Church—from a distance, obviously—but none of them involve killer albino monks.
Unfortunately.
24
Drew wrote at Mar 11, 10:10 pm
Timing perhaps? The last decade of the 20th century and this current one seem to have brought willingness to believe in conspiracy into a state of fashion. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. There’s no doubt that ideas follow trends much in the same way that fashions do, many beliefs and ideologies of the 1950s would be unthinkable now (literally) except to a very small percentage of the population. And while there’s never been a shortage of conspiracy theories I feel that there has been an increased willingness to accept them without question in the last decade or so. I feel that it started with the approaching millennium. Approaching years ending in more than one zero always seem to drive people a little bit crazy, we are an odd species.
That line from Watchmen where the Commedian says “if we lost Vietnam it would have driven us crazy as a country”
I think the approaching millennium in the 90s followed by 9/11 actually did drive the (Western) world a little crazy.
25
Catriona wrote at Mar 11, 10:22 pm
9/11 definitely drove the Western world a little crazy. I find it very hard to explain to my (increasingly young) students—well, to the ones who come to university aged seventeen, who were so young when it happened—that the world just took such a strange, sudden turn after that happened.
I really didn’t figure the millennium was such a big deal. I mean, I thought it was kinda cool and not something I’d ever see again, but I really couldn’t understand all the apocalyptic flapping around that people were doing. I still can’t, actually. It’s an arbitrary date imposed by our own calendars—and we sort of got is wrong. So why would it mean anything to the cosmos in general?
26
Tim wrote at Mar 12, 09:03 am
9/11 didn’t drive the Western world crazy. It drove America crazy, and the rest of the Western world was carried along for the ride.
27
Catriona wrote at Mar 12, 12:27 pm
Maybe, but it feels as though the end result is much of a muchness.